Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2005. Mattie was three years old! For some reason Mattie loved hand and foot painting. Here is where we differed immensely! In any case, this was not an unusual scene in our dining room. As Mattie loved to create and yet was very neat about the whole thing. He never ran around our home with paint all over himself. In fact, when he was done painting, he would lift his arms up so I could carry him into the kitchen to clean off in the sink. The wonders of Mattie.
Quote of the day: Pain is such an uncomfortable feeling that even a tiny amount of it is enough to ruin every enjoyment. ~ Will Rogers
She recently completed her PhD in psychology and she shared a copy of her dissertation with me. The focus of her research is examining the impact of a child's death from cancer on parents. I look forward to reading it because she created a new theoretic model that was intriguing to hear about.
What did I learn from my friend today? Well many things, but the top two are: 1) Psychosocial issues associated with cancer are universal. It doesn't matter what country you are treated in, children and families are impacted. and 2) Bereaved moms tend to have many significant health challenges after the death of a child. Issues that follow us indefinitely. We talked about the biological mechanism that may explain why these issues arise.
What is clear, is we are both driven by a mission that was created for us by our sons. We can see that in each other, and we also candidly talked about how we feel when surrounded by people who are talking about their healthy children. Naturally we listen and absorb the information from our friends, and over time we have even learned to channel our anger over what we are hearing. This is needed otherwise, we are sure to say something totally insulting or hurtful to friends and family. However, we both admit that by not speaking our minds, we internally take on those hurt feelings, which I assure you lands up making us feel depressed and hopeless.
However, the one phrase she used today which I absolutely loved, was "unicorn dust." When she describes how it feels to live without her son in her life, she says it feels like someone has taken away all the unicorn dust. In other words, when her son died, the fun, the intrigue, and the magic in her life faded away. Many of the topics we discussed today, would be devastating for the average person to hear. But to us, we shared our commonplace feelings, as these are feelings that unite all bereaved parents. Feelings we keep to ourselves, but unfortunately are ever present.
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